Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. xii, 353 pp. (Figures, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$28.95, paper. ISBN 9781478017615.
This remarkable book provides a rare deep dive into the lives of a group of people who are often the subject of unfounded stereotypes and misunderstanding. Chinese international students in Australia and other Western countries are often assumed to be nationalist zealots, blindly defending the Chinese government, rote learners incapable of critical thinking, or otherwise lacking in personal agency. Very seldom do we have the opportunity to hear from Chinese students themselves about their lives, experiences, and worldviews.
Dreams of Flight explores the significance of transnational mobility in the life aspirations of young, middle-class Chinese women. Notably, 60 percent of outgoing students from China are female, and the book shows the highly gendered dimensions of transnational mobility. Overseas study can (at least temporarily) liberate women from societal and family expectations around marriage, enabling women to explore alternative ways to think about life trajectories, relationships, and sexuality. More generally, transnational mobility can generate independence and “mobile self-fashioning.” However, mobility is also driven by gendered discrimination in the Chinese labour market and exposes women to new gendered and racialized challenges in Australia.
The book is based on an eight-year ethnographic study with over 50 Chinese women students in China and Australia. In engaging with these young women over such an extended period, Fran Martin gained a level of understanding into their lives that few researchers have achieved. In addition to the usual interviews and focus groups, Martin organized regular group activities including weekend day trips, barbecues, and other social gatherings. She also maintained “virtually daily contact” with the group via social media. A fluent Mandarin speaker, Martin clearly gained the trust of these young women, many of whom shared with her deeply personal stories and heartfelt perspectives, sometimes including confusion and ambivalence. The resulting analysis is breathtaking in its depth and complexity.
The book includes chapters on Chinese women students’ use of media, their experiences of employment, sexuality, faith, and patriotism. In each chapter, Martin draws out the complexities and contradictions of the students’ experiences, challenging the tendency to reduce Chinese students to a stereotype, or explain their experiences using a singular conceptual framework.
For example, the chapter on media explains how Australian Chinese-language media enables greater connection with local places in Melbourne, but also acts as an “encapsulating force” by shoring up “exclusivist” race and class politics, seen graphically in the alarmist reporting on “African gangs.”
The chapter on work highlights the irony of Chinese women students studying abroad to maintain or improve their class status but experiencing downward mobility in Australia when they are excluded from professional work experiences in the mainstream Australian workforce, and relegated to exploitative, semi-legal work with Chinese-Australian employers.
For me, the standout chapter in the book is “Patriotism: Feeling Global Chineseness.” Exploring the much-noted tendency for Chinese students to display vehement and sometimes aggressive nationalism, Martin goes beyond conventional understandings of this behaviour, framing it in terms of a “performative ethics of national representation.” She explains that “there are situationally appropriate ways of speaking about China that hinge on to whom the representation is addressed, who is making it, in what capacity, and in which forum” (220).
In public, international contexts, Chinese students affectively experience China’s humiliation and honour “as their own” (245). In these contexts, China’s achievements must be praised, and its honour defended against insults, just as one would defend one’s own mother as part of one’s “filial-patriotic duty” (222). In less public, informal exchanges, students are freer to express more ambivalence about their home country: for example, concern and disgust at a perceived lack of cultural civility in China’s towns and rural areas. As one student noted, “China just gives people the impression of a peasant who’s suddenly struck it rich” (231).
Rather than simply contrasting the two distinct approaches to patriotism, Martin reflects on the significance of the contradictions in Chinese students’ perspectives. Ultimately, she argues that the contradictions symbolize the historic pivot point that Chinese students currently find themselves in: “between two distinct historical moments in these mobile young people’s sense of China’s place in the world” (236).
Similarly, Martin explains how living abroad provides Chinese students with more complex affiliations with China, enabling many to distinguish between loving the country and loving the government. Being a patriot does not have to entail supporting Xi Jinping, some of her participants explain. Others take the opportunity to investigate “sensitive” topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre. Overall, the chapter superbly demonstrates the complexity of individuals’ orientations toward the nation and state, which “commonly encompass patriotism and mistrust; affective attachment and reflexive critique” (240).
What the book does best is precisely this incisive exposition of contradictions, challenging any singular or deterministic narrative. The depth of Martin’s ethnographic research enables the complexities of Chinese women students’ experiences and perspectives to be fully laid out. Chinese students are “both a rising middle-class elite and a racialized migrant minority group” (285). They can be patriots in public and ambivalent critics in private. They may adopt a neoliberal-style ideal of the mobile enterprising individual in order to resist neotraditionalist gender norms, even while neoliberalism in the hands of private enterprise and the state is used to discriminate on the basis of gender and age.
While their “dreams of flight” define Chinese women students’ life aspirations, the personal and societal implications of their mobility cannot be easily captured. This book provides a deep sense of the complexities and contradictions inherent in transnational mobility, showing us the dangers of simple narratives, and most of all, allowing the everyday humanity of Chinese students to shine through.
Christina Ho
University of Technology, Sydney